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unless he makes a mistake next time, or the time after that.”
    The director looked alarmed. “You think there’s going to be a next time?”
    “There’s an outside chance that he bore some personal grudge against Senator Wallace, but I doubt it. He’s on a crusade, and he’s only just begun.”
    “How do you know all of this?” the director asked.
    “I don’t know any of it,” Kinney replied. “I worked in profiling for a while, and I’m an intuitive investigator, that’s all.”
    “So you’re guessing?”
    “You could call it that, but if I’m guessing, then I’ve guessed my way into this job.”
    The director was turning red in the face. “Well, you listen to me, Kinney. You’d better stop guessing and come up with some real evidence that will help me catch this man, and you’d better do it quick, or I’m going to find myself a new deputy director for investigations.”
    Kinney stood up. “No, you listen to me, Mr. Heller. I’ve got twenty-seven years on the job, and I could retire tomorrow and quadruple my salary in the private sector. I know that, because I’ve had offers, so there’s nothing you can do to scare me. In fact, you’re the one who ought to be scared, because you’re hanging on by your fingernails, and chances are you’re not going to be around long enough to fire me. Until you do, I’m going to run this investigation as I see fit, which is a hell of a lot better than you or anybody else in this organization can do, so stop trying to pressure me. When I have something more concrete, I’ll tell you. Until then, stay out of my way.”
    Kinney, feeling enormously relieved, walked out of the director’s office, leaving the director agape, and went to his own office down the hall. Only twice before in his career had he spoken to a superior that way, and never to a director, but he was beyond caring now, and he was going to work his own way or not at all.
     
    HE STAYED LATE at the office, went to another floor and copied the senator’s files, two index cards to a sheet. He placed the copies in a shopping bag and went home to the residential hotel where he had been living since his separation from his wife. There, he locked the copies in his personal safe. He was too tired to read them.
     
     
    10
    THE PRESIDENT AND the first lady got out of the presidential limousine, shook hands with the bishop and the greeting party, and walked into the National Cathedral.
    Will had been in the building many times, usually for funerals or memorial services, and he was always impressed with its size. It was said that the Washington Monument, laid on its side, would fit inside the nave. He followed a priest down the center aisle and, before he took his seat, he and Kate went to Betty Ann Wallace and murmured words of consolation.
    Freddie Wallace’s corpulent body rested in a mahogany coffin so large that it reminded Will of Napoleon’s casket in L’Ecole de Militiare, in Paris. He hoped the gravediggers in South Carolina had been warned.
    The service began briskly and got slower, with each speaker taking more time than had been allotted, drawing out the sound bites for the media, who were represented by a pool camera set up to one side of the coffin. Will was the last speaker on the program, and finally, his turn came. He stood up and walked to the pulpit.
    “I have known Freddie Wallace since I came to the senate to work for Senator Ben Carr, more years ago than I like to think about. The very first thing I remember about him was that he knew my name the second time I saw him. I was flattered, because I didn’t know at the time that Freddie had a prodigious memory, that he never forgot a favor or a slight, or the name of anyone who might be useful to him at some later date.
    “Freddie and I spent the entire length of our acquaintance on opposite sides of nearly every political question that came our way, and yet he found time, even when I was a lowly senate aide, to share with me his